This summer is going to be another one of those insane summers. Next week I’ll be at CERN for the ATLAS Physics Week. This will be my first (of many) trips to CERN in quite some time, and I am excited to see how the place has changed now that […]
In all my years as a post-doc, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with a number of students. There have been a few to whom I have been more of a mentor than to others, and in the last year both of them have successfully defended their theses. They […]
Over Christmas break, I started tinkering with virtual machines. At the time, I was using VMWare, which is free but not open-source. Since then, I’ve been falling in love with VirtualBox from Sun, which is both free and open-source and multi-platform [1]. Over break, I realized that I had a […]
Between the heroin addict and the beat cop with the concussion, pale and leaning over a bucket, Professor Erwin Biggle was immensely uncomfortable. The Discovery Channel was droning in the corner, airing some reality TV show about a bunch of surly fisherman gutting tuna or some other horrible thing. The […]
Jodi and I were catching up on TV shows tonight; she’s recovering from yet another cold, plus some inexplicable abdominal pain that put her in the ER earlier this week, and I’m catching up on all the rest I lost worrying about her. We were really pleased to see that […]
Well, I decided to go through with it. I kept an audio diary of my trip to Washington. I think it conveys better than writing some of the emotions of the trip. I didn’t get to do interviews, like I wanted – there was just no good time to actually […]
Each year, about 50 physicists from all across the United States and, in a few cases, the globe, converge on Washington D.C. to bring messages to our lawmakers. These messages include thanks, first and foremost, for the support we receive for science. High-energy physics is a difficult enterprise to sell […]
Next week, I will be co-leading a team of physicists from the SLAC community to Washington D.C. As I remarked in my professional blog, the number of research physicists in Washington D.C. may spike next week in a historically unique way [1]. I haven’t done any audio projects in a […]
This last week’s episode of the TV show “Bones”, named “The Science in the Physicist”, featured the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, a suspect in the murder of a theoretical physicist sent over a hundred death threats to the victim because he feared the end of the world when the LHC […]
Everybody needs a day that’s just about them. Birthdays don’t count – people see that coming. You need one of those great, unexpected my days, one that is delicious because you spring it on people. OK, mine wasn’t all that spontaneous. I spent my Sunday afternoon two Sundays ago, and […]
The weekly critical look at the media, NPR’s “On the Media”, did a piece on the changes to Texas science standards. It’s a good piece, and has the great quote from TEA Chairman McLeroy about “standing up to experts”. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/01
The House and Senate both passed their Budget Resolutions last week. These are not actual appropriations. Instead, they are guidance on how to budget money in this and coming years (up to 2014, in this case). The right way to think about the budget resolution is as a ceiling; you’ll […]